Chaffee County commissioners said at a public meeting Tuesday they are working to find out what more they can do to protect immigrants after outcry about a Salida mother and her young son detained by federal immigration agents Aug. 19.
Around a dozen people urged the three commissioners, all Democrats, to adopt new policies to protect residents from immigration arrests, including posting relevant state and county laws and policies on county buildings and requiring Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to have a judicial warrant to make arrests at county buildings, among other measures.
“The county commissioners share everyone’s outrage,” Commissioner P.T. Wood said. “I’m really sorry that this happened. … We’re going to do everything in our power, which unfortunately, is not very much.”
The Colorado Sun previously reported on the arrests of Carolina Suarez Estrada, 33, whom ICE handcuffed inside the Chaffee County court complex Aug. 19. Her 7-year-old son, Luciano, was detained by ICE later that day.
Footage from body cameras worn by Chaffee County sheriff’s deputies and incident reports obtained by The Sun show the officers responding to a call from a worker in the probation department about Suarez and her partner, Darwin Arriche-Sierra, hiding in an office with a worker while the ICE agents waited in the lobby.
ICE agents said they had attempted to pull over Suarez and Arriche-Sierra when they left the court complex, but the two pulled back into the probation department office and ran inside. ICE agents described this as a crime. The agents said they were initially targeting Arriche-Sierra, who had visited court that day as part of a recent drunken driving case, for immigration violations. But they also told deputies they planned to arrest Suarez for evading them.
Suarez asked a deputy why the men were chasing them, according to the body-camera footage. She told the deputy she had a 7-year-old son in Buena Vista. Arriche-Sierra said ICE was chasing him and asked the deputy if he could leave through another door.
The footage shows that Sheriff Andy Rohrich and deputies urged Suarez and Arriche-Sierra to leave the office, saying they were obstructing government operations. The sheriff and a deputy told the ICE agents to wait outside where Suarez and Arriche-Sierra couldn’t see them so that the agents could arrest them when they left. Suarez and Arriche-Sierra left the office and waited in the lobby, where ICE agents reentered the building and arrested them inside.
Colorado law
Some at Tuesday’s meeting criticized the sheriff and his deputies’ actions during the arrest.
They included Lauren Hansen, a friend of Suarez who drove Luciano to the ICE facility in Alamosa where agents had taken Carolina. Using Suarez’ phone, ICE agents at first urged a family member to take Luciano, but the family member feared he would be arrested too, he said. The Sun is not using his name for fear of retaliation.
The mother and son are being held in a family detention facility in Texas. Arriche-Sierra remains in a detention facility in Aurora, according to ICE’s website.
Suarez faces no pending criminal charges, her lawyer Kymberly Renaud said. Renaud submitted a request Tuesday that Suarez and Luciano be released while her immigration case is pending.
“Leaving a child in limbo while a parent is taken away violates every principle of human decency and cuts against the very spirit of Colorado law,” Hansen said at the commission meeting. “Trust in law enforcement cannot survive when compassion is missing.”
Colorado law prohibits state and local law enforcement from aiding in federal immigration enforcement outside of their criminal enforcement duties. But aiding immigrants could invite federal punishment. Federal prosecutors charged a judge in Wisconsin earlier this year with obstruction after she allegedly allowed an immigrant and his lawyer to leave through a back door.
“I think the sheriff and his team did the best job they could do under a really difficult situation,” Wood, the commissioner, said Tuesday. “There’s one person to blame for this. He lives in the White House in Washington, D.C.”
Rohrich, in an interview Tuesday, said he and the deputies followed Colorado law.
Once the ICE agents told him Suarez and Arriche-Sierra had committed crimes by hiding from the agents, Rohrich said he could not challenge them.
“I can’t challenge federal authorities on their probable cause,” he said. “They told us this is no longer about civil detainment, this is a crime. That’s putting us on the front saying you have to abide now.”
Rohrich said he and his deputies deny ICE requests to arrest people leaving the county jail, known as civil detainers, almost every day.
“If we wanted to cooperate with ICE they’d have 500 (immigrants) already from Chaffee County,” he estimated.
Rohrich urged concerned members of the public to ask his office for the body-camera footage.
“I feel confident we did everything by the book,” he said. “We’re constantly working with immigrants who are victims of crimes, we’re not handing them over to ICE, we’re protecting them.”
“It’s unfortunate this child got caught up in this,” he said of Luciano. “It’s ICE’s responsibility to make sure that child is looked after if they remove the adult from the home.”
ICE is not allowed to arrest people who are going to or coming from a courthouse, per a 2020 Colorado law.
Hans Meyer, an immigration, civil rights and criminal defense lawyer who helped draft the law, said the ICE agents likely violated that state law when they first attempted to pull over Suarez and Arriche-Sierra after they left the court complex.
Later, once Suarez and Arriche-Sierra were hiding in the probation department, Meyer said ICE appears to have been “manipulating around the edges of state law protections to concoct a reason to arrest somebody.”
A 2018 order from the then-chief judge of the 11th Circuit, which covers Chaffee County, that allows for noncriminal arrests on courthouse grounds only if court staff are notified beforehand is still in effect.
Members of the public urged commissioners Tuesday to do more, including requiring judicial warrants from ICE agents who seek to make arrests in county buildings and requiring signs about county policies be posted at county buildings.
“These are some of the measures we could have already put in place to protect a collateral pickup like Carolina Suarez, but we didn’t act quickly enough,” one commenter said. “Please correct that situation as soon as possible, so that we may avoid further traumatizing our valued community members, our coworkers, our friends and our mothers.”
A commenter who identified herself as a youth social worker said her children have played soccer with Luciano, the young boy detained by ICE.
“He is a kind little 7-year-old boy who translated for his classmates, and he’s been put in an ICE detention center,” she said. “He’s going to experience lifelong trauma because of that.”
Wood said the commissioners have reached out to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office to see what more they can do.
“What are our options right now? No one knows,” he said. “We’re not getting good direction. There’s not good advice. There isn’t a simple solution, and there’s not a clean solution.”
A spokesperson for the attorney general’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Commissioner David Armstrong said the commissioners would review the suggestions from the public.
“If there’s areas that we can tighten up or improve on by putting signs on the door, we’ll do that,” he said. “We’re all as U.S. citizens and/or immigrants between a rock and a hard spot, fighting our federal government, and that’s not what this democracy was designed for.”
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